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The LTTng kernel and user-space tracer were designed for traditional Linux hosts but can also be used in a container environment. While we currently lack high-level functions and integration with container technologies, the raw data can be gathered and analysed by the seasoned lttng user. This talk will detail what is currently available, what we would like to add and hopefully what the community would expect from a container aware version of LTTng.

The LTTng kernel and user-space tracer can help solve a wide variety of problems (especially those hard to reproduce ones). There are four main ways of extracting and processing an LTTng trace, and each of them addresses a different use-case. In this presentation we will demonstrate these modes and present real-world situations where they can be used. If you already know how to use LTTng you will learn new ways this tool can help you, and if you don't, you will probably discover a new way to address these complex problems.

In the past, a lot of effort has been invested in high performance kernel tracing tools, but now the focus of the tracing community seems to be shifting over to efficient user space application tracing. By providing joint kernel and user space tracing, developers now have deeper insights into their applications. Furthermore, system administrators can now put in place a new way to monitor and debug systems using a low intrusiveness tracing system, LTTng.

Mathieu Desnoyers is co-author of a series of articles on Userspace RCU published on Linux Weekly News. These introduce the Userspace RCU library, which brings RCU and efficient data structures to user-space.

For a numbers of years, silicon vendors have been providing hardware tracing facilities to embedded developers. By using these, developers can resolve performance and latency issues more quickly, resulting in shorter time to market. In this talk, we will cover the hardware based tracing facilities offered by various manufacturers and see how they differ from their software counterparts with respect to their instrumentation capabilities, transport mechanisms, output formats, etc. We will also show how joint hardware and software tracing can be used by developers to gain deeper insights in their applications’ behaviour. Finally, we will outline the on-going work within the Linux Trace Toolkit next generation (LTTng) project to enhance hardware tracing support and tracing data visualization.